Spanish Florida: the first territory of the current USA where black people were free

Officially, slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865 with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to its Constitution.

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However, black people had been free for the first time in the territory of the current United States long before that date, and they were free under the flag of the Spanish Empire. As I already told you here 4 years ago, in 1687 Spanish Florida began to offer refuge to black slaves who fled from the British colonies in North America (the United States did not yet exist). For those escapees, known as "maroons", the limits of Florida became the doors of Freedom. That territory had been incorporated into the Spanish Empire on March 27, 1513, by the hand of Juan Ponce de Leon.

These maroons, already free men under the Spanish Crown, formed black militias to defend Spanish Florida against the British. In St. Augustine, the oldest city in the continental United States, these free blacks they created a refuge that would also end up sheltering the North American Indians dispossessed of their lands during Queen Anne's War (1702-1713) between England and France. One of the most famous members of those militias was the Creole Francisco Menéndez, a slave who escaped from the English and whose militiamen swore to spill the last drop of blood in defense of the Great Crown of Spain and the Santa Fe. ". Menéndez was one of the protagonists of the famous Battle of Fort Mosé of 1740, in which the British devastated that settlement of free blacks in Spanish Florida.

It is worth remembering those events becausetoday marks 200 years since the lowering of the Spanish Flag in Florida and its delivery to the United States, a moment from which many of those black slaves -among them them Menéndez- emigrated to Spanish Cuba to remain free and Spanish. The Spanish Army today remembered that bicentennial with a video tribute to General Manuel de Montiano, a native of Bilbao, who was governor of Florida during the Battle of Fort Mosé (the video is in Spanish, you can activate the automatic English subtitles in the bottom bar of the player):

That July 10, 1821, 308 years of Florida belonging to Spain came to an end, more than it has been part of the United States. Despite these 200 years that have passed since the lowering of the Aspa de Burgoña In that territory, Florida today preserves a large part of its Spanish legacy. It is one of the US states where the Spanish language is most widely spoken: 22.5% of its population uses it regularly, a figure which exceeds 4.5 million speakers. This percentage practically coincides with that of its Catholic population, which is 21% of the total. Today In Fort Mosé, black citizens of the United States continue to remember their Spanish past with reenactments of the battle of 1740, waving the Cross of Burgundy alongside which their ancestors fought.

Significantly, in 1900 the State of Florida adopted this flag in a referendum: a white flag with a red cross and the State seal in the center. It is a design made expressly to commemorate the Spanish imperial flag that flew in those lands for three centuries.